Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Whittle-le-Woods to Whin's Bridge.

It all got a bit farcical with our gennie. On Tuesday it was mended and dispatched back to us. On Wednesday, due to a “misunderstanding with the courier” it turned up back at Genpower. Their MD must have used several choice phrases before sending a very apologetic email ensuring us it really would be with us on Friday. It finally arrived at David & Kate’s house at about 3pm; just in time for us to pick it up on the way to Kate’s birthday weekend in North Yorkshire. It’s now safely installed in the well deck in its own little cupboard with a big hefty chain and padlock securing it to the boat. So far it’s started on the key, so it looks like it’s staying. While all this has been going on we’ve been charging our batteries with a 1kw two-stroke gennie that Wiltz was good enough to lend us. It sounds like a Lambretta when it fires up and it’s a bit on the noisy side, but it has been a blessing this last two weeks and has meant we’ve not had to run the engine on tick-over, which does it no good whatsoever and takes about an hour of hard graft to it to recover and stop smoking.

The aforementioned party took place in a big old farmhouse near Aysgarth falls called The Rookery  At any time over the four days there were between eight and thirteen of us in residence with no phone signal, no wi-fi, no post and just a mountain of food and drink to keep us company. We had to indulge in the almost forgotten art of entertaining ourselves and it was lovely.

Thank you, dear friends, for inviting us; it will be fondly remembered for many years.

When we got back our fourteen days were up so went up the Johnson Hillock locks,

had one night between the top two, one night on the 48hr moorings outside the Top Lock pub, then moved up to a quiet little spot at Whin’s Bridge.

Nearest post code is PR6 8HN Click here, then zoom out. (We're where the footpath crosses the cut, not where the "A" is.)

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Whittle-le-Woods

Our good friend Karma has been smiling at us again and has put us in a terrific walking area just as it has become dry enough to get out there and enjoy it. Whilst this fabulous weather continues we’re determined to get our boots on every day and make the most of it. So far this week we’ve totted up about 45 miles, several of which have been of the up-and-down variety; bit of a shock for a couple of tow-path dwellers. Still, we don’t seem to have suffered any permanent damage – quite the reverse in fact - and we thought it would be nice to share with you, Dear Reader, some of the beautiful Lancashire scenery that we’ve had to put up with.

Good news on the gennie front; it’s on its way back with assurances from Genpower’s General Manager, no less, that all is now well, and that it will give us years of trouble free service. If that turns out to be the case we’ll be chuffed to little mint balls.

We’re going to start putting post codes on the blog entries so you can see where we are on Google Earth or, more precisely, you can see what where we are looked like four years ago.

Legend is at Whittle Springs PR6 8AB

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Adlington to Whittle-le-Woods.

The saga continues. After several phone calls, Genpower agreed that we should send the Hyundai back for either a refund or a replacement. Dave & Kate obliged us by letting us use their address for the collection so on Sunday we went over there for the afternoon and left a big box in their hallway. UPS duly arrived on Monday morning and took it away and their on-line tracking says it was Returned to Supplier on Wednesday. We’re now back to waiting for Genpower to return our phone calls, a situation that we know from experience calls for endless patience and dogged determination.

We’ve moved on again; after a week at Adlington we fancied a change of scenery so we went about five miles up the cut to Whittle-le-Woods,

at the bottom of the Johnsons Hillock flight. The weather has certainly been on our side and we’ve been taking advantage of it. The West Pennine Moors are just the other side of the motorway so we’ve been out walking at every possible opportunity. We’ve been round reservoirs; there are eight which feed into the Rivington treatment works and we’ve walked round most of them.

We’ve climbed up hills; at the top of Rivington Pike you can see for miles,

and there are acres of terraced gardens in the woods below.

We’ve ambled through wooded valleys and pretty villages and reminded ourselves just how beautiful this country of ours is.

We had a day walking round Chorley, the nearest town, and we think it’s a lovely place. There are three country parks surrounding it and we managed to join them together in an 11 mile loop,

and just happened to go past the world famous Fredrick’s Ice-Cream Parlour on the way back to the boat.

Well it would have been rude not to.

We also went for a walk along the Walton Summit Branch; a mile or so of un-navigable waterway which leaves the Leeds & Liverpool where we’re moored and ends at a bridge in Whittle-le-Woods.

It doesn’t look much now but this was the route to Preston and Lancaster and, together with the nine miles from Wigan top lock, the main line of the Lancaster Canal which was incorporated into the L&L. There’s a monument at the end made of locally produced mill-stones, and a plaque describing how they were sent around the world, the journey starting with a canal boat.

Lancashire in the early spring is full of promise of things to come with little packages of bright green shoots ready to burst out everywhere you look. There are snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils and lambs and we feel very good about life. The last couple of days we’ve started off with ice on the canal, but after a full day of sunshine it’s been warm enough to sit out in the well deck with a cup of tea, before coming back inside and lighting the fire as the sun goes down.

We can’t really say that it’s been difficult this winter, or that it has presented us with much in the way of hardship. Just recently we have found ourselves bereft of free firewood and having to use coal, but only because we didn’t bother to stop and collect it when the opportunity arose. If that is the extent of our difficulties you won’t hear us complaining.

Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Wigan to Adlington

It came as no surprise that three days after leaving work at Yodel, Ann-Marie got a phone call asking her to do another week of nights to cover holidays. So while Dave got on with the engine ‘ole, Ann-Marie went back to Martland Mill and said goodbye to everyone again. She has now really finished, and to celebrate the fact we’ve moved the boat up to Adlington,

which puts us somewhere other than a Wigan post-code for the first time since November. It feels good to be doing our thing again and although we’re only five miles further on it’s like a different world – mind you, that‘s probably more to do with the three days of sunshine we’ve just had than anything else. Adlington seems like a nice little town; so far we like the café, and there are a couple of pubs that look worth investigating. There are also the Rivington Reservoirs, laying at the foot of the Pennines just the other side of the M61, with a maze of footpaths just begging to be trodden. A week here is just what we need.

The engine room re-fit is almost finished. Hopefully it will have resolved a couple of problems that have not so much plagued us since we started, but certainly niggled. Primarily the bulkhead between the bedroom and the engine room (which forms the back wall of the wardrobe) was uninsulated. This has meant that even with extra ventilation the wardrobe has always been prone to being damp. Also there is only partial insulation in the engine room itself; below the gunnels is bare steel which collects condensation like it’s going out of fashion, which in turn makes the whole thing damp and is turning the plywood black. Also there is a storage issue, mainly due to hastily erected temporary shelves becoming overfilled so that to get to anything you have to move everything else, a task not made any easier by the presence of a huge great diesel in the middle of the 5’ square space you’re trying to work in.

So.

We’ve dry-lined the back of the bulkhead using batons and ply sandwiching 50mm Celotex insulation. That should sort out the wardrobe. At the same time the wiring got trunked and tidied up. The wall linings came off and another layer of polystyrene insulation got put in. The roof lining (which was uninsulated) has had holes drilled in it and we’re going to fill it with expanding foam.
This is what it looked like half way through.

Under the gunnel on the corridor side there is now a new ply panel and a layer of Celotex which should stop condensation dripping into the bilge. We’ve built a partition across the boat going from just above the gunnel on the engine vent side, over the engine and down to the floor in the corridor side separating the engine room into two areas. Below the partition, which includes the back end, weed hatch etc. it is uninsulated and ventilated to the outside. Because warm air from the rest of the boat won’t now get in contact with the steel every time we open the door it should stay nice and dry. Above the partition the walls and ceiling are now insulated properly which will stop it being so damp and keep the rest of the boat a bit warmer. We’ve now got a sensible storage system in there as well, with a drop down door that doubles as a work table. There’s a new panel for the engine controls and the Morse lever is higher up so that you can reach it without having to bend over. The step up to the back door has been redesigned to make access to the weed hatch and fuel cock easier, and because the engine is now under a continuous partition we have the added bonus of it being a lot quieter. We’ve made it all so that it comes apart easily; turnbuckles, wing-nuts and slot-in panels all round mean that when we want to get to the engine it’s a lot easier.

There’s still quite a bit of painting to do and some finishing off but all in all it’s worked out ok.

A week last Thursday we woke up to find that during the night someone had broken into the front of the boat and had stolen our generator and folding sack truck.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We have a cupboard to keep the gennie in, we have a chain and we have an alarmed padlock; the employment of any of these would probably have provided enough of a deterrent to thwart person or persons unknown, and would certainly have resulted in enough of a racket to stir us from our slumber. But no. No, we couldn’t have made it easier. We’ve even installed a PIR light in the well-deck that let them see what they were doing.

The twelve-year-old policeman, who turned up with some crayons and a Postman Pat notebook to record details of the crime, must have gone back to Wigan nick wondering how we still came to have any possessions at all with such a sloppy approach to security.

Why we have become so lax about things is simply through a gradual process of familiarity breeding contempt. When we first got the gennie it was locked to something all the time, even when it was running it would be chained to the Armco or a mooring ring. But you get complacent. During the dark winter months we use the gennie every day and all the locking and unlocking becomes a pain, we didn’t believe anyone could get into the boat without waking us up and we got lazy. Well now we know better. A sharp slap in the face from the less savoury elements of society has hopefully brought us to our senses.

Of course what we don’t want to happen now is for us to swing too far the other way and become paranoid. We put that to the test three days after the break-in by leaving the boat where it was and going away; on Saturday to Karen’s where we went out for a meal with Mum and Dad, then on Sunday to Chloe & Shandy’s for a stop-over so that Dave could go to the dentist the following morning. There is no doubt that it was the hardest two nights we’ve ever spent away from Legend, we stoically refused to worry and put our bravest smiles on, but it was with an enormous sense of relief that we returned to find it unharmed.

We’ve filled in the insurance claim form and sent it off, which may have been a waste of a stamp, we’ll have to wait and see. However, what we couldn’t wait for was a new gennie. A re-think in both security and what we use our gennie for has resulted in the replacement being twice the power of the old one and being permanently housed in the well-deck. We’ve moved the blue plug and its RCD fuse box from the back so that it can be plugged in all the time, and the best bit is that the new one is electric start, which means we don’t have to pull it out to fire it up. It can spend all its time locked up in its box and it should only ever be unchained for its annual service.

We had it delivered to Chloe’s as we were back down there the following Saturday for Harry’s 30th birthday. We went out for an Indian with a bunch of our kids’ mates, (or is that our mate’s kids?) it was a really good evening and we spent it feeling old. Frankie had got him a Rally Driving Experience at Silverstone for his birthday and had managed to keep it a secret till the meal. His face was a picture when he opened the envelope, then when he realised it was in the morning he nearly fell off his chair.

We would have stayed to watch but we had to get back to move the boat. We came up here on Sunday morning, Dave walked back and picked up the car while Ann-Marie did some baking, then in the afternoon Bill, Emma, William & Evie came for tea. All very civilised and a lovely afternoon.

The only fly in the ointment with all this seems to be the reluctance of our new Hyundai generator to actually run. We’ve got the Chief Mechanic at GenPower on the case, so hopefully it should all be resolved before long. As usual you’ll be the first to know.

Stop Press: The new gennie is working and there's a chippy two minutes walk from the boat. It's all good.

Stop Stop Press: The new gennie is now back in its packaging ready to be returned with a letter about how we need a machine that does what it says on the box. Thankfully, due to the generosity of our mate Wiltz, we have another gennie on loan untill it's all resolved

Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Wigan Top Lock.

Well that was fun! Legend is now just above the top lock of the Wigan 23 and has the accolade of being the first boat in 2013 to go up.

We would like to thank David & Kate who came to stay aboard for the weekend and without whose help we wouldn’t have even attempted it. The statement in the last entry that read “…. the ice shouldn’t cause us any problems.” turned out to be slightly less than the truth as you will see…..

David & Kate arrived around lunch time on Saturday and we’d already decided against moving that day as there was so much snow on the ground locking would have been down-right dangerous, but by Sunday most of it had cleared so off we went. The bottom nine weren’t too bad; lots of ice breaking but nothing we couldn’t plough through.

Our plan was to do it over two days so we stopped for the night in the long pound just before the locks get really close together. Not the ideal overnight mooring; the local kids and dog owners did little to impress us, so despite waking up on Monday to find that it had once more dropped below zero overnight and the ice was all a lot thicker, we decided to try and do the rest of the flight anyway. A quick walk up the cut revealed that the pound we were in was the worst, and if we could get out and into the next lock we should be able to carry on. With lots of to-ing, fro-ing, rocking and bashing, and with the Lister on Full Chat we managed to achieve some – sporadic – forward motion

and got out of the pound in about twenty minutes. After that it was a steady slog; there were several locks where we had to break the ice behind the gates to get them open, two or three paddles that weren’t working and one lock where the bottom gates were leaking so badly that it wouldn’t fill completely, and we had to ram the top gates to get out. Despite all that, by two o’clock we were moored up outside the Kirkless Hall pub where Dave & Kate’s car was parked, two locks down from the top. Mission accomplished.

We did the final two a couple of days later on our own and we’re now moored just round the corner for a week or two. Dave made a start on re-lining the engine room, and then the following weekend went off to Chesterfield on his own to help Anne take down an eye-sore of a cherry tree.

She’s going to store all the wood while it seasons and we’ll reap the logs for next winter.

The next 12 miles of the Leeds & Liverpool is a lot older than all the rest of it. This is because this bit started off as the bottom end of the Lancaster Canal, going from the Bridgwater Canal at Leigh northwards towards Preston, but it never got connected to the northern part due to there not being enough money to build an aqueduct over the River Ribble. Instead there was a light gauge railway that made the link, spanning the river on what must have been a rather rickety wooden bridge. When the L&L was begun the company first leased, and then later bought this bit from the Lancaster Canal Co. The Lancaster fell into decline – perhaps because of all the transhipping between boats and railway trucks - and now a very short silted-up arm ending under a bridge where Legend is moored is the only evidence of the Southern Lancaster’s existence.

Ann-Marie’s last shift was on Sunday, so now we can get our lives back to normal. That means a bit more walking, a bit more boating and a bit more visiting. Isn’t Spring Brilliant?

Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Wigan.

There are two sides to being moored up in a town centre. On one hand it can be an expensive do; there’s a Screwfix and a Wickes within walking distance, which has resulted in one or two improvements – the beading in the bathroom is finished and there’s a nice new shelf with a light under it in the kitchen.

Also the box lids in the well deck have got non slip panels where you stand to get in and out.

On the other hand it can be very much in our financial interest to have a 24 hour supermarket on Ann-Marie’s way home from work at 5am.

These are the CRT’s new offices in Wigan and very nice they look too.

If you’re passing it’s certainly worth popping in, if only to pick up a copy of Towpath Talk. We popped in for a new Handcuff Key. This is the essential little device that opens the security locks on paddles on the Leeds and Liverpool.

Without one progress is – well - impossible really. Paddles are locked to stop unnecessary emptying of locks and pounds by the Bash Street Kids armed with nothing more than a mole wrench. While undoubtedly required practice in urban areas, the policy of securing every paddle on every lock does seem a bit excessive, especially on some of the more remote ones – the Rufford and Glasson branches for example. You also need one on the BCN where it’s referred to as an Anti-vandal or Water Conservation Key, and we got one in a hurry after getting stuck at Smethwick almost a year ago, but we sometimes come across a paddle that we can’t open due to it spinning round without doing anything. We had a feeling that as we didn’t get it from BW, the hole in the end might not be quite the same size as the genuine article. We’ve now got a new one and it’s a much better fit, so either the old one has worn (doubtful) or we were right and it was sloppier to start with.

Any road up, we’ve now got a spare one so when we’ve got help locking it’ll be quicker, and we don’t have to worry quite so much about dropping one the cut.

The frozen ground means that we can at last walk somewhere other than the towpath without finding ourselves up to our knees in mud. To the south-east of Wigan alongside the Leigh Branch there are a number of flashes where mining subsidence has resulted in lakes and ponds so we had a pleasant afternoon wandering around a couple of them.

The weather forecast looks good for going up the flight on Saturday; we’ll have a walk up on Friday to see what the ice situation is but at the moment, although a couple of the pounds are frozen over, it’s not thick enough to cause us any problems.

Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Appley Bridge to Wigan.

OK, so far 2013 hasn’t been a blazing whirlwind of excitement. That’s not to say that nothing has happened. For one thing, we bought a new mattress and organised the logistics of getting it into the boat and onto the bed, and the disposal of the old one. (Chucking it in the canal, whilst seeming to be the favoured option of certain segments of the population, who curiously appear to go to extraordinary lengths to get their unwanted stuff in the cut rather than their local tip, was not something we considered.) We found a bedding shop in Wigan close to the towpath and put our order in. As with all things boaty, you can’t just buy one off the shelf, but unlike some narrowboat bedrooms with clever designs ours isn’t a weird shape, it’s just a bit smaller. Once we’d found out that descriptions like “¾ “, “small double” and “queen size” all meant the same thing; ie. 4’ wide, the job got a lot easier. When collection day arrived we left Appley Bridge and cruised into Wigan, leaving the old rolled up mattress in the back of the car as we went past. We moored up opposite the new CRT offices at Henhurst lock and walked round the corner to the showroom. The salesman offered us the use of his estate car to move it but as we pointed out, by the time we’d wrestled it in, driven across the car-park and wrestled it out again, it would have been easier just to carry it to the boat. So that’s what we did. To get it in the front doors we simply rolled the cratch cover back and lifted the king plank up; all very slick. A woman walked by while we were performing, looked at the mattress in its polythene cover and asked “Have you got a bed that big in there?” Dave said “Yes they’re all this big.” Ann-Marie said “No, the downstairs ones are bigger.” Sometimes they just ask for it.

Chloe and Shandy came for a visit while we were at Appley Bridge. It’s been a while since they’ve been to the boat – understandably, we took it a long way away from them – and that isn’t going to change much until later in the year when we start heading south again. I was lovely to see them; we had a very relaxed evening, followed by pancakes and a walk through Fairy Glen the next day.

For our first two nights in Wigan we tied up outside the CRT office which is as safe as houses, being on the off-side and behind a locked gate. However, it’s a 48 hour mooring so on the Monday night we pushed off to the towpath side. We’re quite sure if we’d asked nicely we’d have been allowed to stay put, but there’s more sunshine over here and we don’t have to cross any bridges, making it closer to town.

As far a safety is concerned, it seems to be as good as any other city. Doubtless there would be tales of woe if we cared to listen, but we don’t.

It looks like we’re going to be iced in here in the next day or two. Hopefully it will be clear again in a couple of weeks as on the weekend of 26/27 Jan we’re planning a full scale assault on the Wigan flight of 23 locks. There is a mooring refuge about half way up, and a pub at the top so it should be ok even if we end up on our own. It’ll be good practice for when we come back over the Pennines on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, which has 74 locks in 19 miles. And a 3 mile tunnel.